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There are many, like My Space or https://ello.co/beta-public-pr...

Per https://ello.co/shanen0/post/n... the software that increases productivity is investment and extremely poor societies can't afford those investments because essential production is already absorbing all the available resources. Or in other words, there's no sense in trying to squeeze blood from a turnip when he doesn't even have a turnip.

Entertainment category software is different and there is no rationale I can see for discounting it. Right now I'm having trouble thinking of any software that would qualify as essential, at least in the context of an extremely poor society.

Ello.
https://ello.co/

I actually started my analysis of the Fermi Paradox from the other side. What if some civilization wanted to be noticed? Turns out to be a relatively minor problem, which strongly indicates that no one wants to be noticed. Alternatively, they tried it and got shut up quickly. Bottom line is that no one is trying right now (where now includes the 100,000 years it would take to span our galaxy--still an extremely small value of "now" on the galactic scale).

My position has evolved over the years, but I'm basically standing on the position that the synthetic intelligences (ASIs) that replace the naturally evolved intelligences like us are amused. They are watching and probably gambling quatloos on whether we create ASI successors before exterminating ourselves. Longer version at:

https://ello.co/shanen0/post/v...

Again hoping for "funny" or "insightful" comments at Slashdot, but it's a young article, soon to become an obsolete article...

Many years ago I worked for a startup subsidiary of GE and I was not impressed with the management style. I don't think it's just sour grapes due to my being pushed out the door, because the entire subsidiary died a couple of years later. Some kind of Internet thing. Of course it was doomed, eh?

Then again, after reading Jack Welch's book, I think there are grounds for concern. If GE is still as he made it in his image, then it's a dangerous and sociopathic entity. If it were an actual human being, then it is probable that we would all be dead now. Shades of the vicious ASI (artificial super-intelligence) in Our Final Invention (My quasi-review at https://ello.co/shanen0/post/g... as of last week?) No respect for your humanity after GE gets enough IoT devices into the market, and they still design lots of devices for the Chinese to build. Of course the Chinese involvement creates another layer of concern.

We need an economic system that rethinks things in terms of freedom. Cf my sig, eh?

Well, not all of them, but I'm sadly sure that some criminals will be willing to take advantage of the situation. Of course the most serious threat is that the extremely black-hat hackers will exploit the unlocked WiFi networks to pwn routers and linked computers for later abuse. In accord with Dan Ariely's research, the criminals will think they are being relatively nice guys by saving their major depredations until after the immediate emergency has been addressed.

https://ello.co/shanen0/post/f... is a quasi-review of one of his books about dishonesty, even including an honest email exchange...

However, I think it would be much better if we did it the other way around. Rather than maximizing the profits of the big Internet companies, we should always be configured to run as much of the infrastructure as possible on our own systems. In other words, WiFi routers would normally be configured for safe sharing, and handling emergencies would just be a natural extension of wireless communications that the big Internet companies are not controlling and profiting from.

Punchline is that profit is not the primary driver of the bad design. It's all about controlling our communications. I think the primary driver for centralized control of the Internet is the governments. They WANT the rules and laws to work that way. If things got out of control, if the peasants were actually in charge of the Internet, how would they control the peasants? Real democracy scares them more than anything.

It's just a matter of keeping up with technology, and we can't. We evolve in a blind and slow process, while machines evolve fast, faster, fastest. Linear growth versus logarithmic. We lose.

Short conclusion: The stable intelligences must be machines. They would also be long-lived to the degree that interstellar travel is no problem for them. Extremely unlikely they haven't surveyed the neighborhood and spotted all the life-bearing planets. Gets more speculative, but if they are curious, then they would quite likely be interested in watching how life evolves, but that's partly on the theory that life diverges while computers converge. If they are lonely, they might be interested in company created by the transient naturally evolved intelligences.

Probably not my latest version, but I couldn't find one later than this: http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... The quatloos part is a Star Trek joke.

Regarding your comment about climate change, here is my recent palliative solution: https://ello.co/shanen0/post/w...

My reaction (sent to Mozilla) to the inclusion of the Amazon plug-in:

[Firefox has made me] very, VERY sad indeed. Amazon? Why don't you just shoot my privacy in the head? It would be a kinder solution. More to the point, sucking up to Amazon is NOT going to fix your terrible financial model. Amazon does NOT share any of Mozilla's laudable goals, but "partnering" with those vicious privacy-destroying monsters will destroy you, too. How can ANYONE possibly trust an Amazon partner? Amazon will share a few pennies with you--but Amazon will laugh when you go bankrupt anyway.

Now I've suggested an alternative business model of project-oriented charity shares. I'm already getting blue in the face from repeating that solution, but you are ABSOLUTELY NOT offering a better alternative. Amazon is EVIL, and now I regard Firefox as EVIL, too. My chief regret is that there are no alternatives that are significantly less evil--and it always comes back to stupid financial models.

Longer version with more about the alternative financial model I favor: https://ello.co/shanen0/post/8...

Good point, yes I got that press release from them after I'd filed the story:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
and here's the charter:
https://ello.co/downloads/ello...
Although as someone else pointed out, it looks like under Delaware law a 2/3 supermajority could vote to amend the charter, or to be bought out by another entity that doesn't have to honor the original charter.

If the self appointed RealNamePolice hadn't made such a stink, ello wouldn't have gone viral. Suddenly facebook, a company I loathe and despise and use only with fake names, has competition. I haven't seen their service, but ello have a good manifesto, and plan to use a business model where their end-users are customers rather than assets. Facebook has achieved a degree of critical mass they've been using to revert the internet to AOL. Unless an open distributed social networking protocol emerges (unforunately, Diaspora wasn't able to make it happen), someone has to run the backbone of social networking, and I'd rather it wasn't Facebook.

So thank you RealNamePolice, not for being a dork harrassing Drag Queens, but for stirring up 30,000 Facebook users an hour to go somewhere else.

How anyone would connect to FB these days without running every privacy filter under the sun is just baffling to me. It's bad enough that FB tracks everything you do when you're using the app. But now they want to track everything out do OUTSIDE the app as well? No thanks.

I read with interest about new sites like this --> https://ello.co/beta-public-pr...

Ok...it's still in Beta, and it's invitation only so far, and the functionality is pretty sparse. But for people that just want to connect with friends without having every single movement tracked (even after they exit the application), Ello holds some promise.